An Expert's Advice on Collaborative Technology, Social Media, and Growing your Business
Many people have strong opinions about what works and what doesn't when working with a brand in social media! Keeping up a brand image is hard work, and staying consistent is even more difficult!
Recently, our CEO sat down with Thibaud to discuss this subject! In this blog, Hollywood Branded learns how Thibaud Clement is establishing brand consistency and building a following for his brand by using collaboration.
A Little More About Guest
Thibaud is the CEO and co-founder of Loomly, which he launched with his wife and business partner Noemie, along with three other successful businesses over the years. As a self-taught programmer, Thibaud began building software to make their jobs easier managing a marketing agency and developing an in-house solution to streamline the process of creating and sharing editorial calendars with their clients, namely for social media, and Loomly was launched.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: With everything you're doing, you're competing. How are you competing with Hootsuite, HubSpot scheduler, Later, and anything that is a scheduler of your social media for collaboration?
Answer: The funny story is, the very first version of Loomly that we had built actually didn't have any scheduling or publishing features. It was the bare bones, whereas you could come to the platform, you could upload an image, upload a copy, and it would generate a mock up of the posts for you and your team, and you could share it. It was a simple link and it was a notification to someone, and they would be able to preview what the post would look like, and then they would be able to approve it, or leave a comment and say, "Hey, can you change that?" Or even maybe change it themselves. To this day, it's still the core value proposition of what we do.
What we do is we help marketing teams collaborate, and also we cover the entire content publishing workflow from asset management to ID generation to, of course, content creation. We also have a studio where, you mentioned Canva, we have something similar. It's called Loomly Studio, and you're able to crop your images to the popular social media ratio, then you add text and filter and all this crazy and cool stuff. Then once you have your content, it generates a preview for you and your team. Then once it's approved, you can publish and respond to comments and get analytics.
We cannot do the full spectrum, but marketing teams come to our platform is because they are able to work together. They're able to preview the assets and the posts, and also the ads, because we also support Facebook and Instagram ads, and they can collaborate. They can say, "I love this post. No, please change the copy on that post, because it's not compliant with the brand," or, "Maybe let's use another asset," or these kind of things. What's great about Loomly is that it's not really about saving time, like publishing to multiple channels. You can do it, of course, but the true value is making sure that anything that you actually publish to social media is actually on brand. There is no typo, there is nothing that is not compliant with whichever regulation that you operate in, and this kind of thing. That's where we are really different.
Question: In your history, you've owned ad agencies, marketing agencies, you've done all sorts of things that you came up with solutions for. What are some of the common issues that you see where collaboration just goes awry? Like whether or not it's with Loomly, but just in general. What happens?
Answer: What we see today is that successful social media marketing and collaboration is all about having a team working together on these projects, and ideally a cross-functional team, meaning you not only involve just a marketing guy or a marketing person, you also invite sales people and product people and HR people and legal people, and even financial people, because they all have something different to bring to the table and they will make your content richer and more in line with the brand. They will just make it better.
That's usually the top thing that we see, is marketing teams where you involve people from different parts of a company or a business. So that's the top. Working backward, it's true that sometimes it may be overwhelming if you have just one person who is handling it, because every month you have to start from a blank slate and come up with 10, 20 or 50 posts for the upcoming months. That's where it's challenging. Doing it on your own may not be the easiest thing to do. Also, if you are only just the marketing department, maybe at some point, you're going to miss some insights from the users or the customers or the prospects. That's why we believe that what we see today from the most successful brands, it's people who work as a team and as a cross-functional team.
The other thing where we see successful teams actually doing very well, is actually understanding that it's a process. They have a workflow where they usually work in a batch. Here are your upcoming months of content. Rather than, saying, "Oh, it's 9:00 AM. I need to post by 10:00 AM. What am I going to say?"
This is usually something that you want to avoid (because when you work in a batch and you look at couple of days, weeks, or even months down the line, what you're able to do is you're able to develop a brand story. You're able to see how things are going to unfold over time and how we are going to tell a consistent story that is going to make sense to people who follow you, where you will have maybe some repetition of some messages and maybe some nuances in some messages. At the end of the day, this is how you will be building your brand, because you're going to be telling a consistent brand story).
Part of the process is working in a batch and ahead of time, and as a part of the process, which is very important, it's making sure that you involve the right people so that you are able to get some feedback and some approval and that you communicate with them the deadlines for when you expect to have an approval and some feedback, and what kind of approval and feedback you are expecting from them. Then, that you have specific roles assigned for who is creating the content, who is approving, who is publishing, who is answering to comments and mentions and messages, and who is doing the reporting at the end of the month? Usually, having this team workflow in place where who is doing what and when, is usually a very, very solid basis for success.
You have the workflow and then you can have the tools to implement the workflow. Some of the things that you have at Loomly is that you have assignments so that when someone is supposed to review a piece of content and they are going to receive a notification, they won't miss it because you can send it over even email, or push notification, or even Slack and Microsoft Teams, so they can't say they didn't get it. You have those reminders, and then if the post has not been approved one hour before it's time to publish it, then you will get another notification. It's like an autopilot, almost like an additional member in your team that tells you, "Hey, remember to do that." That's how you can also take it to the next level in terms of productivity priority.
Question: You all are so involved with social media. What are some of the best practices now? I know your software allows your incorporation of your RSS feed, so you could share your blogs. What type of content is actually getting noticed now that people really should be focused on this year?
Answer:
Number one, this has been true probably for the last 10 years, and I anticipate is going to keep being true in the next few years as well, is that consistency beats creativity every time. It's not about trying to go viral, and maybe you post a video or a photo and then for a few hours, you're trending, but then what's going to happen in 24 or 48 hours, well, nothing because that was just, you went viral and then you get forgotten. This is why we say consistency beats creativity every time, or luck, because when you are consistent and you have this work flow we were talking about, and you put out your 10, 20, 50 posts per month, maybe you're not going to go from zero to a million subscribers in a month, but over time you are getting to build your audience. You're going to engage with them and they are going to trust your brand. That's how you build your business and your brand over time.
Number two, if we look at the type of content that we are seeing more and more, which is very obvious, it's videos. Text, of course works. Imagery is very, very important. It's the bread and butter of social media. These days we see that algorithms, they favor videos, users, they enjoy videos because they get even more information in a smaller amount of time. We see more and more social media actually focusing on video.
Video marketing is actually one of the trends that we have identified for 2021 as the marketing trends and the things that we anticipate to see more and more. There are more and more smartphones equipped with tremendous cameras that allow you to make exceptional videos at no cost. We have video-focused social networks rising. We do believe that video is one of the big trends and it's one of the types of content format we're going to see more and more of.
The third part of my answer is where to go next? What are the best social networks to be on? There are usually three that we are the most impressed with these days. Number one, of course, TikTok, how can you miss it? It's tying into what I was saying. TikTok is fast-growing. It's impressive. It went from this musical niche to something that is more mainstream, and there are so many people who are passionate about it. It's really fascinating to see the growth that this platform has been experiencing. TikTok, if you're in the consumer business, is a great place to be.
Second, which we believe is highly underrated, maybe it's a bit scary because of the type of social network that it is, is YouTube. We feel like YouTube has a huge potential. We see that once you reach a certain scale, it goes really really fast. We've seen many examples of YouTubers who had just a couple hundred views in the early days, but then they kept pushing. It may have taken them three years to go from zero to 1 million subscribers, but then going from one to three took just less than 12 months. So there is a huge potential with YouTube, because it's more than a social network where you just follow people and you see the videos, it's also a search engine where actually people look for tutorials and information and things like that. It's a really, really powerful platform.
The last one, which we also think is a bit underrated, is LinkedIn. There is a lot happening on LinkedIn. They are putting out a lot of new format, like Stories. You can publish long form posts on LinkedIn. You can publish as a company, as a profile. Also, it's a bit more B2B. There are many, many things that you can do with LinkedIn, which we find fascinating.
Those would be our three favorites. I would say best practices are having a solid workflow, two, maybe trying to invest in video producing and three, looking into TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Question: How many posts should people be doing? Depending upon the platform, what is best practices there? Whether it's Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube? Where should people be concentrating their time and efforts?
Answer: I don't think there is a one size fits all solution. If we talk about Instagram, the most popular, I would say, accounts that I see, usually anywhere between two and four posts per week. Under that amount, people may forget about you because there are other accounts that are more active. Over that amount, you may start to overwhelm people and, depending on how frequently they check into Instagram, maybe if they feel like they are missing out on five or 10 posts because you've published that much in a couple of days, then they may be frustrated.
Then this is a good rule of thumb for, I would say generally social networks. Of course, on Twitter, you can be a bit more prolific. On YouTube one video per week works. It's already very solid. The best and the most prolific YouTubers, they tend to post maybe two or three per week, but that's when this is becoming your full-time job. There are even some who actually publish one video per day. It's very, very impressive, but you don't need to go that far on the platform. Then, LinkedIn, I would say maybe twice a week is usually what you see.
Question: If someone's starting out, or maybe they have a platform that just hasn't been really their focus in a while, how fast should they expect growth? Whether they're like, "It's my first Instagram account, I'm putting it up there." Or it's, "I've been in business for 10 years, but we haven't focused on this." How fast should they expect actual growth to happen?
Answer: I know there's probably not a one-size-fit-all answer to that, but the thing is, if you're just getting started, here is what's most likely going to happen. You're going to create an account and then publish a couple of posts. Then, you are going to have a lot of traction, a lot of reach because it's the early days. Then, you're going to go through a dip, because it's how it works. Social networks, they try to incentivize you to start a new account. Your first few posts, you may have a lot of reach and interactions and likes, and then you may go through a dip.
That's when you want to keep posting. Many social networks, for instance, even on YouTube, they actually reportedly look into how perseverant you are. There are so many channels that are created every year, just last year I think it was something like seven million channels created, and that's not accounts of people who want to watch content, it's people who want to create content. They cannot just over-promote everyone who is just getting started. They give you a cake at the beginning, and then they will make sure that you keep posting, even if it's becoming a bit more challenging. Then, you will have another spike.
I would say depending on what you are trying to accomplish, you have to at least give it three months before you just see some first results. Then, at the end of your first year, you will have an idea. If you've been consistent and you've been continuously improving your content by looking at what made people react, and what they don't like, and what drives conversions if you have an e-commerce business, then at the end of the first year, you will have a sense of whether you're going into the right direction or not. I would give it time for sure.
Check Out The Podcast!
Thibaud has AMAZING information from his experience in marketing, collaboration, and technology. check out the podcast below to learn more about how to drive your business from his advice and expertise!
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